"Serenity Systems International is pleased to announce the availability of eComStation 2.0 RC4 for download. eComStation 2.0 will offer unparalleled performance with Bootable JFS and support for multi-core CPUs. This is the eighth public beta release of eComStation 2.0. This product is available for download to all registered eComStation customers with active Software Subscription Services. This version of eComStation 2.0 is the fourth Release Candidate, no big changes or additions will be added before the GA version, it mainly consists of updates to drivers and installation scripts."

To all of you who think eComStation will not succeed, I think you should re-evaluate your positions. eComStation can have a much greater chance on the desktop than any Linux out there if IBM supported it. Why? Because it is like Windows but it's not!

No way it would succeed. IBM has barely put work into OS/2 after the late '90ies (Single Input Queue anyone?). I have seen eComStation up to 1.2, and it compares roughly to Windows NT 4.0 in look & feel and feature set (though, arguably NT4 has better multi-user support, and a more stable kernel). Besides that, it has relatively little hardware support compared to Windows or Linux.

But more importantly, eComStation suffers from the traditional OS chicken and egg problem: software developers will not develop for eComStation unless there are more users, users will not come to eComStation unless there are more applications. This killed many finer desktop candidates, including BeOS.

Linux got around that, because it had two advantages: 1. initially, a very large part of its user base were developers, 2. Linux is a UNIX-clone, and once Linux became an acceptable UNIX workalike, it could leverage existing UNIX applications. Still, it took many years to get at the point it is now.

The server market has been somewhat easier to get into, but not with fine candidates like Windows, Linux, *BSD, which all have superior server performance, virtualization, good multiuser support, etc.

Suppose that, in the very unlikely scenario that all the problems above were dealt with. Who is going to pay that amount of money for an operating systems in 2008 (eCS is expensive, because Serenity has to pay IBM license fees)? Now, suppose that that problem also vanished. Microsoft is still the licensor of a lot of code in OS/2. If OS/2 became a serious threat, they would pull some strings to shake out that competition.

Face it, OS/2 was a fine system for its time, but the show is almost over. Once Serenity Systems or Mensys decides to back off, the curtain falls.